I don't think it's his arrogance per se so much as the fact that his method works so reliably when it really shouldn't. He looks at a stain on someone's clothing, thinks of the most likely course of events by which that particular stain could have come about, and concludes that this must have been what happened. He's like a statistician who's great at coming up with point estimates but has no sense whatsoever of their precision. And yet, he always guesses correctly. And Conan Doyle wants you to believe that he's just very observant and a quick reasoner. I would find the whole premise a bit easier to swallow if Holmes canonically had some supernatural power that eliminated uncertainty.
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"did you know that in real life all those stats for how often the average person thinks about sex are ACTUALLY about ice cream?"
Well, Doyle did try to kill him off like a couple of times. He really hated the character and was doing it for the money/exposure.
</Thing I read on cracked>
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
I remember that. Yes, Conan Doyle deserves some credit for hating Sherlock, I guess, although trying to rehabilitate him somehow would have been the more heroic thing to do.
One story I remember enjoying was The Red-Headed League, for the sheer weirdness of the villain's plot.
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"did you know that in real life all those stats for how often the average person thinks about sex are ACTUALLY about ice cream?"
In a way that makes things like House or Paych better, because they almost always jump to he wrong conclusion first.
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"You can't keep throwing people at your problems, dear." - Emma Frost to Colossus
~Jacehan~